How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)

Thom Obarski

From the August 2016 New York City Vim Meetup, Max Cantor explores tradeoffs between plugin complexity, and achieving similar results with built in Vim features.

Vim is big; so big that it does some very useful things that are often overlooked. Plugins can buy us a lot of functionality, but they can add a lot of burden in the form of dependency complexity. In this talk, we’ll explore some of the tradeoffs we can make between plugins and “vanilla” Vim features that achieve similar results, including:

  • autocomplete (VimAwesome, YouCompleteMe)
  • file jumping (FuzzyFinder, Ctrl-P)
  • visual filesystem navigation (NERDTree)
  • build integration
  • snippets

The “slides” and supplemental vimrc are available here

Check out more meetup presentations, editor tips/shortcuts, lightning talks, AMA’s, behind the scenes bloopers, and more by subscribing to the thoughtbot YouTube Page!